Lark Rise, Flora Thompson [most life changing books .TXT] 📗

the men

would have said; but they all enjoyed the stir and excitement of getting

in the crops and their own importance as skilled and trusted workers,

with extra beer at the farmer’s expense and extra harvest money to

follow.

 

The ‘eighties brought a succession of hot summers and, day after day, as

harvest time approached, the children at the end house would wake to the

dewy, pearly pink of a fine summer dawn and the swizzh, swizzh of the

early morning breeze rustling through the ripe corn beyond their

doorstep.

 

Then, very early one morning, the men would come out of their houses,

pulling on coats and lighting pipes as they hurried and calling to each

other with skyward glances: ‘Think weather’s a-gooin’ to hold?’ For

three weeks or more during harvest the hamlet was astir before dawn and

the homely odours of bacon frying, wood fires and tobacco smoke

overpowered the pure, damp, earthy scent of the fields. It would be

school holidays then and the children at the end house always wanted to

get up hours before their time. There were mushrooms in the meadows

around Fordlow and they were sometimes allowed to go picking them to fry

for their breakfast. More often they were not; for the dew-soaked grass

was bad for their boots. ‘Six shillingsworth of good shoe-leather gone

for sixpen’orth of mushrooms!’ their mother would cry despairingly. But

some years old boots had been kept for the purpose and they would dress

and creep silently downstairs, not to disturb the younger children, and

with hunks of bread and butter in their hands steal out into the dewy,

morning world.

 

Against the billowing gold of the fields the hedges stood dark, solid

and dew-sleeked; dewdrops beaded the gossamer webs, and the children’s

feet left long, dark trails on the dewy turf. There were night scents of

wheat-straw and flowers and moist earth on the air and the sky was

fleeced with pink clouds.

 

For a few days or a week or a fortnight, the fields stood ‘ripe unto

harvest’. It was the one perfect period in the hamlet year. The human

eye loves to rest upon wide expanses of pure colour: the moors in the

purple heyday of the heather, miles of green downland, and the sea when

it lies calm and blue and boundless, all delight it; but to some none of

these, lovely though they all are, can give the same satisfaction of

spirit as acres upon acres of golden corn. There is both beauty and

bread and the seeds of bread for future generations.

 

Awed, yet uplifted by the silence and clean-washed loveliness of the

dawn, the children would pass along the narrow field paths with rustling

wheat on each side. Or Laura would make little dashes into the corn for

poppies, or pull trails of the lesser bindweed with its pink-striped

trumpets, like clean cotton frocks, to trim her hat and girdle her

waist, while Edmund would stump on, red-faced with indignation at her

carelessness in making trails in the standing corn.

 

In the fields where the harvest had begun all was bustle and activity.

At that time the mechanical reaper with long, red, revolving arms like

windmill sails had already appeared in the locality; but it was looked

upon by the men as an auxiliary, a farmers’ toy; the scythe still did

most of the work and they did not dream it would ever be superseded. So

while the red sails revolved in one field and the youth on the driver’s

seat of the machine called cheerily to his horses and women followed

behind to bind the corn into sheaves, in the next field a band of men

would be whetting their scythes and mowing by hand as their fathers had

done before them.

 

With no idea that they were at the end of a long tradition, they still

kept up the old country custom of choosing as their leader the tallest

and most highly skilled man amongst them, who was then called ‘King of

the Mowers’. For several harvests in the ‘eighties they were led by the

man known as Boamer. He had served in the Army and was still a fine,

well-set-up young fellow with flashing white teeth and a skin darkened

by fiercer than English suns.

 

With a wreath of poppies and green bindweed trails around his wide,

rush-plaited hat, he led the band down the swathes as they mowed and

decreed when and for how long they should halt for ‘a breather’ and what

drinks should be had from the yellow stone jar they kept under the hedge

in a shady corner of the field. They did not rest often or long; for

every morning they set themselves to accomplish an amount of work in the

day that they knew would tax all their powers till long after sunset.

‘Set yourself more than you can do and you’ll do it’ was one of their

maxims, and some of their feats in the harvest field astonished

themselves as well as the onlooker.

 

Old Monday, the bailiff, went riding from field to field on his

long-tailed, grey pony. Not at that season to criticize, but rather to

encourage, and to carry strung to his saddle the hooped and handled

miniature barrel of beer provided by the farmer.

 

One of the smaller fields was always reserved for any of the women who

cared to go reaping. Formerly all the able-bodied women not otherwise

occupied had gone as a matter of course; but, by the ‘eighties, there

were only three or four, beside the regular field women, who could

handle the sickle. Often the Irish harvesters had to be called in to

finish the field.

 

Patrick, Dominick, James (never called Jim), Big Mike and Little Mike,

and Mr. O’Hara seemed to the children as much a part of the harvest

scene as the corn itself. They came over from Ireland every year to help

with the harvest and slept in the farmer’s barn, doing their own cooking

and washing at a little fire in the open. They were a wild-looking lot,

dressed in odd clothes and speaking a brogue so thick that the natives

could only catch a word here and there. When not at work, they went

about in a band, talking loudly and usually all together, with the

purchases they had made at the inn bundled in blue-and-white check

handkerchiefs which they carried over their shoulders at the end of a

stick. ‘Here comes they jabberin’ old Irish,’ the country people would

say, and some of the women pretended to be afraid of them. They could

not have been serious, for the Irishmen showed no disposition to harm

any one. All they desired was to earn as much money as possible to send

home to their wives, to have enough left for themselves to get drunk on

a Saturday night, and to be in time for Mass on a Sunday morning. All

these aims were fulfilled; for, as the other men confessed, they were

‘gluttons for work’ and more work meant more money at that season; there

was an excellent inn handy, and a Catholic church within three miles.

 

After the mowing and reaping and binding came the carrying, the busiest

time of all. Every man and boy put his best foot forward then, for, when

the corn was cut and dried it was imperative to get it stacked and

thatched before the weather broke. All day and far into the twilight the

yellow-and-blue painted farm wagons passed and repassed along the roads

between the field and the stack-yard. Big carthorses returning with an

empty wagon were made to gallop like two-year-olds. Straws hung on the

roadside hedges and many a gatepost was knocked down through hasty

driving. In the fields men pitchforked the sheaves to the one who was

building the load on the wagon, and the air resounded with Hold tights

and Wert ups and Who-o-oas. The Hold tight! was no empty cry;

sometimes, in the past, the man on top of the load had not held tight or

not tight enough. There were tales of fathers and grandfathers whose

necks or backs had been broken by a fall from a load, and of other fatal

accidents afield, bad cuts from scythes, pitchforks passing through

feet, to be followed by lockjaw, and of sunstroke; but, happily, nothing

of this kind happened on that particular farm in the ‘eighties.

 

At last, in the cool dusk of an August evening, the last load was

brought in, with a nest of merry boys’ faces among the sheaves on the

top, and the men walking alongside with pitchforks on shoulders. As they

passed along the roads they shouted:

 

Harvest home! Harvest home!

Merry, merry, merry harvest home!

 

and women came to their cottage gates and waved, and the few passers-by

looked up and smiled their congratulations. The joy and pleasure of the

labourers in their task well done was pathetic, considering their very

small share in the gain. But it was genuine enough; for they still loved

the soil and rejoiced in their own work and skill in bringing forth the

fruits of the soil, and harvest home put the crown on their year’s work.

 

As they approached the farmhouse their song changed to:

 

Harvest home! Harvest home!

Merry, merry, merry harvest home!

Our bottles are empty, our barrels won’t run,

And we think it’s a very dry harvest home.

 

and the farmer came out, followed by his daughters and maids with jugs

and bottles and mugs, and drinks were handed round amidst general

congratulations. Then the farmer invited the men to his harvest home

dinner, to be held in a few days’ time, and the adult workers dispersed

to add up their harvest money and to rest their weary bones. The boys

and youths, who could never have too much of a good thing, spent the

rest of the evening circling the hamlet and shouting ‘Merry, merry,

merry harvest home!’ until the stars came out and at last silence fell

upon the fat rickyard and the stripped fields.

 

On the morning of the harvest home dinner everybody prepared themselves

for a tremendous feast, some to the extent of going without breakfast,

that the appetite might not be impaired. And what a feast it was! Such a

bustling in the farmhouse kitchen for days beforehand; such boiling of

hams and roasting of sirloins; such a stacking of plum puddings, made by

the Christmas recipe; such a tapping of eighteen-gallon casks and baking

of plum loaves would astonish those accustomed to the appetites of

to-day. By noon the whole parish had assembled, the workers and their

wives and children to feast and the sprinkling of the better-to-do to

help with the serving. The only ones absent were the aged bedridden and

their attendants, and to them, the next day, portions, carefully graded

in daintiness according to their social standing, were carried by the

children from the remnants of the feast. A plum pudding was considered a

delicate compliment to an equal of the farmer; slices of beef or ham

went to the ‘better-most poor’; and a ham-bone with plenty of meat left

upon it or part of a pudding or a can of soup to the commonalty.

 

Long tables were laid out of doors in the shade of a barn, and soon

after twelve o’clock the cottagers sat down to the good cheer, with the

farmer carving at the principal table, his wife with her tea urn at

another, the daughters of the house and their friends circling the

tables with vegetable dishes and beer jugs, and the grandchildren, in

their stiff, white, embroidered frocks, dashing hither and thither to

see that everybody had what they required. As a background there was the

rickyard with its